On May 24, 2004, at 15:34, Nick Christenson wrote:
If they wanted to play, let them get their
early/on time/whatever.
Well maybe. In the old days the WSOP final had a live seat assignment
ceremony that took place the day of the event. No matter how far in
advance you signed up, you got your seat the day of the event.
Now imagine hypothetically, that an event with such a ceremony is
oversubscribed and alternates are assigned the same way as seats, on
the day of the event. In this scenario, no one is choosing to be an
alternate.
The question is: In this case is it better to blind off the alternates
in this case, or not? This isn't so much a question of fairness (since
everyone entering the event had an equal chance of being an alternate)
as much as not wanting to introduce an unnecessary element of luck by
creating an advantage or disadvantage to being an alternate.
I would suggest that in most cases it is better to not blind off the
alternates, because the non-linearity of chip values (especially for
medium-sized stacks) is negligible, but the effect of blinding off may
not be (it probably is negligible in the WSOP final, but not in other
slow-format tournaments where the starting stacks are smaller).